The Condor's Head

by Ferdinand Mount

  It was a beautiful spring morning. The pale sun shone on them as they walked out of the city. In half an hour they were past the Maine gate and more or less in the country. The by-lanes were sprinkled with blackthorn blossom.

  Cordorcet could not go back to his brother-in-law in Auteuil, let alone seek refuge with any of his friends in Paris. His only hope was to throw himself on the mercy of his oldest friends of all, the Suards. They had a big place out at Fontenay-aux-Roses, only a few miles beyond the Maine gate, nothing to an average walker. But Condorcet, cooped up at No. 21 for nearly a year, with his terrible circulation, could scarcely walk at all. He hobbled along beside Sarret who kept on having to slow down to keep pace with him. Every half-hour he had to stop for a rest. When they reached the Montrouge plain it was midday and the sun was hot on Condorcet’s pale flaky face. Sarret embraced him warmly and went back to Madame Vernet, whose response was to leave her door unlocked for the next eight days in the hope of his returning, as one might leave a chink for a runaway cat.

  It was well into the afternoon by the time Condorcet limped into Fontenay. He had been five hours on the road. The Suards were not there. They had gone to Paris. He dared not give the servant his name, still less wait there till they came back. He was too exhausted to return to Madame Vernet’s and in any case he could not have passed through the Maine gate again without Sarret’s help.

  So he trudged back to Montrouge and lay down under a hedge, shivering uncontrollably as the night descended. Under his short carmagnole jacket he had only his green-and-grey striped silk waistcoat, thin grey trousers and cotton stockings.

  The next morning, Sunday, he returned to the Suards. They were still away.

  He spent the day prowling in the woods, keeping well away from the string of villages along the plain. That night he slept in a disused quarry, gathering grass and bracken to soften his bed of stones.

  The next morning at nine o’clock an alarmed servant rushed into Amélie Suard’s room. ‘There’s a wild man with a beard just called. I’ve taken him in to monsieur.’

  Madame Suard waited for what seemed like an age but in reality was no more than a few moments. Then her husband entered. There was a desperate look on his usually imperturbable face.

  ‘Give me your keys, darling – the ones for the wine and the sideboard. I’ll tell you everything later but stay here and don’t move.’

  It was less than half an hour later that Suard came back to her room. As he entered she could see through the open door a man going downstairs, a man with hunched shoulders and an air of the deepest dejection. As the man descended, he searched one pocket, then the other for something it seemed he could not find.

  ‘That was Condorcet, my dear.’

  ‘Is he going away?’

  ‘Yes, he is going away now. It is better.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I have asked him to come back after dark when Jacques has gone home. Then he can stay the night and we’ll find somewhere safer for him.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I’ll go back to Paris and speak to Cabanis, perhaps he can get him a false passport. Please make sure that the door in the garden is opened for him. He has left his tobacco pouch behind.’

  ‘Yes. I’ll see to the garden door.’

  Condorcet was desperately hungry. Suard had been so keen to get rid of him that he had had only a few moments to wolf down some bread and wine. By two o’clock in the afternoon he was famished. He had reached Clamart, a couple of miles from Fontenay. He saw an old inn sign at the crossroads. He did not resist.

  ‘Yes, citizen?’

  ‘I’d like an omelette. Could you make me an omelette?’

  ‘Of course, citizen. How many eggs?’

  ‘Oh.’ He paused. How many eggs did one have in an omelette? ‘A dozen.’

  They were the last words he spoke as a free man.

  A dishevelled customer with four days’ growth of beard who thought you needed a dozen eggs to make an omelette for one person had to be an aristo on the run. And besides, the innkeeper happened to be the commander of the Clamart republican militia. Also present in the inn was the president of the local popular association, a fire-breathing troublemaker who spent most of his time in the pub working up accusations against citizens he had it in for.

  They took no time at all to see through Condorcet’s carefully prepared alias: Pierre Simon, native of Ribemont in the Aisne, fifty years old, valet de chambre. So why no papers, why no cockade? He was taken by the police to Bourg-la-Reine. They took him in a cart because he could no longer walk. He was put into a cell in the local lock-up still claiming to be Pierre Simon, valet de chambre, former soldier, residing at 505 rue de Lille (well known to be the residence of one Citizen Condorcet). They emptied his pockets, leaving him with enough cash to pay the turnkey for his board and lodging.

  The next morning the said turnkey, Antoine Chevenu, found him in his cell stretched on the ground, face downwards, arms by his sides, stiff and dead.

  There were two theories. That he had died of an apoplexy – there was blood coming out of his nostrils and his circulation was notoriously bad. Or he could have taken poison to cheat the executioner. A few months earlier Dr Cabanis had given several of his friends the poison which he called ‘brother’s bread’. It was a lethal mixture of opium and stramontium. History would remember this pioneer in the medicine of the soul mostly for the terminal remedies he gave his friends for the afflictions of the body.

  On the other hand, the prisoner had been thoroughly searched. Where could he have secreted the little pillbox or phial? Condorcet was a clumsy man at the end of his tether, not likely to be adept at concealment.

  Madame Vernet, who had trusted Condorcet so utterly before she had seen him or knew who he was, did not trust Madame Suard’s version of events. The week after Condorcet had been found dead she took the trouble to go down to Fontenay. There she inspected the only door into the Suards’ garden and found a pile of turf wedged against it so tightly that it could not be opened from the outside. The turf had not been disturbed for months.

  IX

  Downriver

  THEY WOKE EARLY when they slept at all. Madame d’Enville thought herself lucky if she had two or three hours a night. The high windows of their room had no curtains. The nuns had needed none, having to be up before dawn to say their office. The convent of the Filles-Anglaises was a shabby old building in a side street behind the Bastille. For centuries it had provided a refuge for English girls with a vocation that they could not pursue in their own country. The girls came mostly from Lancashire. One or two had gone home when the Bastille fell (they heard the firing and the shouts all day, and then the remorseless hammering for days afterwards), a few more when France declared war on England, but most of them stayed, unmoved as were most of their French sisters by the Constituent Assembly’s decrees against nunneries. The monks by contrast unfrocked themselves in droves when the State seized their premises and no longer recognised their vows. Clairvaux and Cluny became lovely ghosts of their former selves. But the English girls went quietly about their business. ‘Girls’ was not really the word; by now most of them were middle-aged because the supply of novices had dried up. As they spoke English only to one another, they had kept their raw Lancashire accent, which Rosalie found difficult to follow, though she had determined to make the most of this enforced opportunity to perfect her English.

  ‘Eh, thou looks a mite peakish today, ma’am,’ Sister Gregory said as she plunged two bowls of soup and a plateful of crusty bread on their table. Sister Gregory had a brick-red face and a bony jaw with protruding upper teeth. She had been born Jenny Holroyd in a village high up in the Pennines where they had burnt witches until quite recently and which she had not been sorry to say goodbye to.

  ‘Peakish, please, what is peakish?’

  ‘Eh, sickly like.’

  ‘I am quite well, thank you,’ Madame d’Enville said.

  Though the convent had been commandeered a
s a place of internment, its rules were tolerably relaxed. The irreproachable character of the nuns reassured even the zealots of the Committee of Public Safety. The gendarmes who came now and then to inspect the place were polite and even tactful by the rough standards of the moment, and outside visitors were not frowned on. Monsieur Patricot came up twice a week from La Roche-Guyon with cheese and eggs from the farm, fresh linen and lavender water, and books from the library. On Wm’s instructions, Gouverneur Morris called in to make sure that they were all right. When they had been at liberty, Rosalie had boasted to Wm in her letters of how cold they had been to the man who had usurped his rightful place. But now they were prisoners and any voice from the outside world was welcome. Anyway, Gouverneur was charming, as he could be, especially to women, when the mood was on him.

  ‘Well, it’s not a bad place you have here, ladies, all things considered. And those gawky girls see to you properly, do they?’

  ‘They are good creatures, though one cannot say they are elegant,’ Madame d’Enville sighed.

  ‘No, I dare say not. If they were, they wouldn’t be in here.’

  ‘No indeed.’ Madame d’Enville smiled. As a child of the Enlightenment she had little more sympathy for the monastic ideal than the sceptical New Yorker, though of course she had always been meticulous in her acts of charity to the local convent at La Roche.

  ‘That’s a fine waistcoat you are knitting there,’ said Gouverneur, gesturing at the dove-grey gilet that Rosalie was halfway through.

  ‘I am so grateful to my grandmother for teaching me when I was a girl. It is such a soothing occupation when one’s mind is overwhelmed with grief.’

  ‘Or with revenge, madam. When I see those old hags clacking away beside the scaffold, I often wonder what they would do if their hands were not occupied with their knitting. Tear the prisoners limb from limb, I expect – but I am sorry, these are not thoughts fit for this company.’

  ‘On the contrary, Mr Morris. We must confront the worst that men – and women too – are capable of or we shall be swept away.’

  ‘I am glad to find you so dauntless, madam.’

  ‘I do not feel in the least dauntless, but these simple women make one ashamed of one’s fear. It cannot be easy for them in a foreign country, pressed into service as jailers, knowing that at any moment they may be massacred as so many of their sisters have been.’

  ‘These are terrible times and I am conscious that I am a woefully inadequate substitute for Mr Short. It is a great pity that he should be called away so long at such a time. I can at least assure you that your loans to him are now set down in his name at the bank and I have power of attorney to draw on the funds whenever you wish. I only wish it were as easy to call back Mr Short as it will be to call on his bank balance.’

  Rosalie felt Gouverneur’s greedy eyes on her and did her best to look impervious.

  How pale she was now, too pale for his tastes and too thin – his own fickle countess was an armful – but he could not deny she made a fine figure in her close-fitting widow’s weeds with her head bent over her knitting. He began to feel comfortable in this plain whitewashed room with its few sticks of furniture and the bright light streaming down from the high window on the roughly carved wooden crucifix nailed to the wall. He almost felt envious of this plainness, this still and quiet existence, while he had to stump about Paris ten hours a day (and his stump had been painful of late, the doctor could not tell him why), watching the sullen crowds, listening to the rattle of the carts carrying the accused to and from the prisons – at times it seemed that half the public buildings in the city had been turned into prisons – struggling through interminable financial negotiations with jumped-up ministers who knew nothing about money and would scarcely last above a month or two in office before they too were chopped down, then snatching an hour of fretful pleasure with his Adelaide, who was not his at all, or not exclusively since she was trying out half a dozen other suitors and had even had her eye on Mr Short before he was packed off to Madrid. How appeasing to the spirit it would be to sit here a while with only a glass of wine for company and the charming—

  ‘You are in a trance, monsieur. You must find our company very tedious after all the excitements of the moment,’ said Madame d’Enville with a touch of her old spirit.

  ‘I beg a thousand pardons, madam. The truth is that I have been bustling around the city too much and my wits are wandering. I have seen too many horrors, madam, though none to touch those you have endured. And there is one more horror to add to the list. Condorcet is dead. Dead by his own hand, according to some. Of an apoplexy, say others. At all events, he has cheated the guillotine, for Saint-Just had him outlawed and as soon as they picked him up, out in the country it was, near Bourg-la-Reine, he was a dead man.’

  As he told the story, the two women listened so intently they might have been jurors listening to some crucial passage of evidence that would either hang the accused or set him free.

  ‘Well,’ said Madame d’Enville, ‘I have lived long enough to know that there is no justice in this world, but there is revenge. I believe that Condorcet could have saved my son, I know that he could have saved my grandson. I cannot now pretend that I am sorry he could not save himself.’

  There was no note of satisfaction in her voice. She might have been some official of the court deputed to read out a judgment written by others.

  ‘I never thought much of the man,’ Gouverneur said.

  ‘I thought the world of him, as you know. That is my sin, which I must carry with me to my grave, which fortunately will not be long coming. It was my own folly to be seduced by his eloquence, his confidence that he and he alone could unlock the secrets of the universe. It was I who promoted him, persuaded my family to worship him and hang on his every word. I cannot forget Charles sitting by the fire at La Roche, he can’t have been more than sixteen at the time, and listening open-eyed as Condorcet went on about some foolishness or other. How could I have been taken in by him, how could I have misconstrued his selfishness as idealism? Oh, I—’

  ‘Maman, do not reproach yourself, he was very persuasive.’

  ‘But I should have seen through him, and I thought I was so wise and enlightened, such a woman of the world.’

  ‘Madam, it has been a duping age and it has come to a bad end. I must take my leave.’

  All of a sudden he wanted to be out of the room. He was discomposed by the figure of the old Duchess, her frail body shaken with these convulsions of guilt but her face hard set with no suspicion of a tear. Rosalie rose to say goodbye. His hand brushed against the cold knitting needles she was carrying and he trembled as though the needles carried some electrical charge.

  ‘Oh,’ he said just as he was turning towards the door, his curiosity never entirely subdued by the most tragic circumstance, ‘that bust you had, the one that Houdon did of him. I heard that you had your servants throw it on the dunghill.’

  ‘That is a vulgar calumny, monsieur. I had them wrap it in straw and carry it up to the attic. It may be that the straw is the cause of your misconception. I would never treat any work of Monsieur Houdon’s with less than the greatest respect.’

  ‘No matter what the subject?’

  ‘No matter what the subject.’

  Shortly afterwards Mr Morris left Paris, under something of a cloud, and he never saw either of them again.

  The unworldly Lancashire women who served as jailers felt no safer from the Commune’s whim than the sophisticated ladies they were guarding in this strange prison. While the sisters said their office mormorando, as though fearful that their voices might percolate through the crumbling old walls and stir up the fury of the local collective, their prisoners, many of them elderly and shaky like Madame d’Enville, sat on the cheap wooden chairs that had been dragged out from the cells into the passage and strove to pick out the familiar words floating through the grille in the rough English accents: ‘Ave Maria, gratia plena, ora pro nobis nunc et in hora mortis nost
rae …’

  Other internees came and went, several of them old friends from their own milieu. Rosalie had been delighted to see the Malesherbes girls, Marguerite and Louise, who shared a cell further along the corridor. Each morning she would knock on their door bearing some delicacy that Monsieur Patricot had brought up and they would sit down on the truckle bed huddled together and share their sorrows and their fears.

  But the morning came when Rosalie knocked on the low door of the girls’ cell and Sister Gregory opened it with a folded blanket over her arm. ‘They’ve been taken away, madame.’

  ‘Oh, not—’

  ‘No, the Committee of Public Safety is sending the lasses to be put together with their mother and their menfolk over at Port-Libre. So there’s some little spark of decency left in these monsters after all. They’ll be better off over there, they do say they hold concerts and dances.’

  ‘Oh, that is good news.’

  In Port-Libre (what a mockery of a name) the prisoners did indeed keep up a plucky imitation of their old life. The place was full of officials and financiers who had figured prominently in the old regime, including Lavoisier the great chemist and greater tax collector, together with their wives and children. In the evenings they listened to Vigée recite his latest verses and actors from the Comédie rehearse from memory favourite scenes from Racine and Molière. Those who preferred to remain in their cells could hear the melancholy dwellings of Witterbach’s viola d’amore. The satisfactions of keeping up such stoic gaiety were enhanced when the latest batch of discredited revolutionaries were dragged in, whimpering and half sick with fear, knowing all too well what was in store since they had helped to draw up the rules. There were two dozen of the toughest Jacobins dumped there, shivering and shitting themselves before they were taken away to be shaved (the sort of slang they delighted in when it was their victims who were in the barber’s chair).

  But those who remained at Port-Libre enjoyed only a short reprieve. The tribunals made it a point of honour now to root out entire families with counter-revolutionary connections, as though the contagion might linger in and spread from the slightest drop of blood that was spared. The Malesherbes girls had a month or so together with their father and their husbands before the whole lot of them were carted off. They shared a tumbril with the Duchesse de Châtelet whom they had never much cared for, the Duchesse de Grammont who was fearfully grand, and the man who drew up the map of the new departments whose name they never quite caught (there was not much introducing in the carts and no chance to choose one’s travelling companions).